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Am in the only one who cringes at install instructions that require piping some curl output into bash? (programming.dev)

submitted 2 days ago by cschreib@programming.dev to c/linux@programming.dev

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curl https://some-url/ | sh

I see this all over the place nowadays, even in communities that, I would think, should be security conscious. How is that safe? What's stopping the downloaded script from wiping my home directory? If you use this, how can you feel comfortable?

I understand that we have the same problems with the installed application, even if it was downloaded and installed manually. But I feel the bar for making a mistake in a shell script is much lower than in whatever language the main application is written. Don't we have something better than "sh" for this? Something with less power to do harm?

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[–] easily3667@lemmus.org 6 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

Don't forget your package manager, running someone's installer as root

It's roughly the same state as when windows vista rolled out UAC in 2007 and everything still required admin rights because that's just how everything worked....but unlike Microsoft, Linux distros never did the thing of splitting off installs into admin vs unprivileged user installers.

[–] brian@programming.dev 4 points 12 hours ago

plenty of package managers have.

flatpak doesn't require any admin to install a new app

nixos doesn't run any code at all on your machine for just adding a package assuming it's already been cached. if it hasn't been cached it's run in a sandbox. the cases other package managers use post install configuration scripts for are a different mechanism which possibly has root access depending on what it is.